"Accomplishments"
At home: Definitely not expecting Role Play to be great - just a gender-reversed, streaming-quality version of True Lies - but I've always responded positively to the comedy espionage genre, and could I resist David Oyelowo (not exactly back in a spy's shoes here, but I loved MI-5) and Bill Nighy (indeed, his scenes turn out to be the best thing about this unambitious movie. Kaley Cuoco is fine as an acerbic assassin-for-hire trying to quit the life, and almost better as the loving wife and mother of two, and the film has some charm by not being cynical about those relationships. While many have criticized this as a remix of better material (that's true), I don't agree that its dialog, for example, is some kind of A.I. aberration. While I'm not handing out Oscars or anything, for me, the film had fun with its dialog and didn't sound like the copy/paste job of many action films. The third act is rather thin as we get into rather plainly-staged action and far too few consequences, undermining the stakes, so on the low end of 3 out of 5 stars, 3 already being my "forgettable, but entertains for most of its length" rating.
With its second season, Reacher becomes more television-like (derogatory) by using his old team, the 101, as a cast of people almost as competent as he is. It also has an over-reliance on catch phrases which we hear repeated again and again, taking the thrill off their final payoffs. The story, based on the novel Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child, has Reacher catch up with what's left of that team when one of them is found dead, tipping them off to a high-level conspiracy that involves an arms merchant with a penchant for comic books (which DOESN'T pay off, annoyingly). When Reacher was interacting with normal people in Season 1, the contrast made the show sing. Here, most of his allies know him already (and I'm more interested in the flashbacks to an old 101 investigation where he's still a surprise to people) and the group kind of devolves into a murder squad and Reacher is practically psychotic. Righteous self-defense, a lot of this is NOT. Still often fun, but it's the second Rambo movie to Season 1's First Blood, y'know?
After daring to sue a studio for breach of contract, maverick Japanese director Seijun Suzuki (best known for Tokyo Drifter) was blacklisted for a decade. His indie comeback in 1980 eschews his past gangster films, but not his formal experiments nor his surrealism. Zigeunerweisen, the first of what would become a thematic trilogy, is the story of a close but trying friendship between two academics in the post-War period, one of them having become a boorish wanderer. Though the Criterion Channel's summation of the film as "cryptic" isn't wrong, it's pretty clearly an examination of what lingers after death. From the voice of a long-dead musician accidentally caught on a record, to poetic discussions about skeletons, and the fading memory of a dead friend represented by having to return all his effects to his widow, Suzuki also creates visual evocations of death in the living (heads decapitated in frame, and so on). But he's also dissecting the state of being dead and not know it, people who are really ghosts, whose illnesses are only prolonging the inevitable, and given the setting, that's also Japanese culture as it gets infected with America's in this era. Dream logic abounds, but dreams also reach into this world and affect it. It's a strong return for the director, but he's definitely moved on since the 1960s - does he count himself as one of the dead?
Adapted from the novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Café Funiculi Funicula is a sweet and sentimental film set in a café where one special seat can allow you to time travel... according to some very stringent rules. Set up as an anthology, it soom becomes apparent that the reserved barista Kazu has a date with destiny as well. The other patrons are thus our way to learn the rules, the film's way to make us smile or shed a tear early on, and surprise, they're never really out of the film. When there's a coffee shop you like, you tend to go there more than once. In fact, it's Kazu's budding romance with Ryosuke - a boy uniquely interested in the past (and cats, there's a good cat actor in this) - that seems the distraction. And yet, that too proves crucial. And I don't mean to make it sound like a tear jerker even if it did jerk tears out of me. It's told with a light touch. It's a dramatic comedy, where time travel is used to help people move forward, not back, and therefore filled with hope and joy.
In Anti Matter, three PhD students find a way to create wormholes and of course, something has to go wrong when they teleport a person through it - in this case, project leader Ana (Yaiza Figueroa, who I'd love to see in other things) - but what? In the first act, we watched people try to figure something out, and in the second, we're in a similar position, spinning theories of our own, rejecting bad hypotheses, coming up with new ones... As Ana suffers from memory lapses, we might be reminded of Memento, but for me, in the way everyone else treats her, it's rather more evocative of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Whispers". Opinions about the final solution may vary, but it's foregrounded by enough metaphysics in the previous 90 minutes to make it of a piece with the rest. Same thing with the potentially pretentious ending (the final shot resonating with what could be the ultimate result of this experiment, on the world and on Ana, depending on how you look at it). I have a soft spot for low-budget indie sci-fi like this, and Anti Matter kept me engrossed.
The time-travelling naval ship movie that isn't The Philadelphia Experiment, The Final Countdown (from four years earlier) has an aircraft carrier travel through a strange, spontaneous wormhole to the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a wormhole that comes to snatch it back before it can do much about it, give or take a thin stock romance and a bit of action against Japanese scout pilots. It mostly plays as a military procedural for which the U.S. Navy supplied all their toys to create one of the most overt recruitment films ever projected on movie screens. The film would otherwise run short of feature length. The proceduralism bleeds into the time travel element, as Kirk Douglas' captain tries to figure out what's going on and Martin Sheen's civilian systems analyst expounds on what it could mean. Unfortunately, he's an ambivalent character who seems sinister one minute, heroic the next, and sometimes seems to council not interfering with history, and other times changing the course of World War II. You never get a handle on him, but that's because neither did the writers. Clever time loop and all, but it feels like a Twilight Zone episode with military propaganda attached, and therefore misses the mark for me.
Books: Volume 4 of Simon Hawke's Time Wars series, The Zenda Vendetta is really Finn's book, but also the squad's superior officer's. As usual, history and literature combine as temporal terrorists (a couple of great villains, but I'm just as interested in the local baddies) hit Ruritania during the events that allegedly inspired The Prisoner of Zenda. The villains have deep connections to boss man Moses Forrester, which involves him in an adjustment for the first time, and his back story is good too. I'm not sure the novel really sells me on the "Fate Factor" that ties history in knots of coincidence, but it's the conceit that forces Finn to take Rassendyll's place in the story (perhaps to explain why it isn't Lucas doing so using the facial reconstruction techniques of the other books) and he acquits himself quite well in the triple role. Lucas and Andre are sidelined for much of this, but they're eventually in the direst of straits, and there's real momentum in the back half of the book, as if possessed by the romantic swashbuckler spirit of Anthony Hope's original story. Fun and exciting.
Though Nino Cipri's Finna works well as a novella, I do wish it had been longer. Maybe there's a universe where it is. The book presents a fictional box store analogous to IKEA in which a wormhole forms to other stores/universes. Two employees, lovers who recently broke up (awwwwkwwward) are forced to go in to rescue an elderly shopper who accidentally stumbled into it. From there unfurls a short multiversal picaresque that turbocharges the satire on capitalism, in particular in the "hive" version of the story the Finna machine brings our reluctant heroes to in the course of their search. They'll come to terms with their broken relationship too. Cipri's prose is deliciously ironic, with strong, aptly judgmental descriptions of places and people that make you immediately relate to them, despite the absurdity of the situation. I do wonder if the final reality they visit is meant to be a "better way" or anti-capitalistic - perhaps pre- or proto-capitalistic - rather than our own late stage hell - a point that might have been more strongly made at twice the length. And while the characters are well drawn, I also feel they could have benefited from more pages. Better to leave one wanting more than overstaying your welcome, however...
RPGs: Had my monthly dose of Call of Cthulhu this week, and though our Keeper hoped to finish that first scenario with this third chapter, we soon got the inkling that it wasn't going to happen. There's always a danger to the party splitting up and various members perhaps spending too much time on side-quests and their own subplots, and that's what happened here. There really was no hope (it's CoC, hope is always fleeting) we'd actually resolve things that night. But all three investigators really did have different wheelhouses to cover, so it made sense in this information gathering phase to part ways. We're a patient lot, I think, so listening to scenes one is not involved in is perfectly acceptable. Especially if they're going to be entertaining. Our Keeper (GM) is very nimble in terms of improvising(?) NPCs and florid details. It was fun to see our teenage girl (really, an old woman who's had time reversed on her) become our muscle (if you consider a tiny Derringer muscle, but it beats my character's penknife). Our photo-journalist keeps making up these wild contacts (Madame Tooth?!), surprising us and the Keeper with neat NPCs. For my part, my task was to make library research exciting, and I'm loving how Phelps' cat Lucifer is fast becoming my explanation for the character's luck stat, for rolls both good and bad. Of course, the ultimate bad luck happened at the end of the night when Phelps had said Azatoth/Beetlejuice/Candyman three times and accidentally opened a portal to the mirror dimension (that sounds too benign, it's actually called the Pathless Wastes) which sucked Lucifer, Elsie and Josef into it. Phelps is left on this side of the veil to rescue them, so good thing he's researched the incantation...
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